Quotes about Israelites

Moses asked God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" Exodus 3:11

God gave the Israelites the Promised Land but told them they'd have to take what was theirs in fierce battle.

God gave the Israelites the Promised Land but told them they'd have to take what was theirs in fierce battle. Why? Probably one reason was so they'd develop the strength to keep it once they conquered it.

He's staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don't know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1—5; cf. Jas 4:11—12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don't are not kingdom people.

Yet God said that no other nation would covet the land of the Israelites, even during their vulnerable and defenseless times. God can restrain not only people's actions, but even their most deeply rooted desires. No part of the human heart is impervious to God's sovereign but mysterious control.

God sovereignly intervened in the hearts—the desires and wills—of the Egyptians to accomplish His purpose for the Israelites.

And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.

God was pleased to indicate and typify both the gift of future and eternal felicity by terrestrial blessings, as well as the dreadful nature of spiritual death by bodily punishments, at that time when he delivered his covenant to the Israelites as under a kind of veil.

The spirit of complaint is born out of an unwillingness to trust God with today. Like the Israelites, it means you are spending your time looking back toward Egypt or wishing for the future all the while missing what God is doing right now.

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgment that what is needed is given and need not be seized.

Unlike these verses from the Koran, references to dehumanization in the hadith compiled two or three centuries later have a distinctly anti-Jewish flavor. They describe how a group of Israelites were transformed into rats, how unbelievers are turned into monkeys and pigs, and how Abraham's father was transformed into an animal and hurled into the raging fires of hell.

The Israelites' slavery in Egypt is the equivalent of our slavery to sin. God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage, and He sent Jesus Christ to set us free.